Zoom presentation about Anne Gass’ new novel, “We Demand: The Suffrage Road Trip.”

The novel is based on the true story of a 1915 road trip for the suffrage cause. It is about middle-aged Swedish immigrants, Ingeborg Kindstedt and Maria Kindberg, who visit San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

They plan to buy a car and have a leisurely drive back to their home in Rhode Island. On impulse, they volunteer to bring along two envoys heading to Washington, D.C., to demand votes for women from President Woodrow Wilson and Congress. Soon they are plunged into a difficult and dangerous journey that pushes them to the limits of their endurance.

Gass is an independent historian with a passion for sharing the history of women’s fight for voting and other rights. The library hosted Gass for a talk in 2020 as part of a “Suffrage Centennial” series. Gass discussed her 2014 book “Voting Down the Rose: Florence Brooks Whitehouse and Maine’s Fight for Woman Suffrage,” a thoroughly-researched account of her great-grandmother’s leadership in the decisive final years of the suffrage battle.